"Netbiz have delivered an excellent name labels e-commerce solution for us, which is fantastically easy for customers to use"

Stikins® is an established international name label product which was developed in 2003. It is manufactured and supplied by Label Planet Ltd via their website. Stikins® can be used on most school possessions, no sewing or ironing is required when they are used to identify clothes, shoes or other personal belongings.

The Challenge:

We were approached to design and develop a new website that focused on an improved customer journey and user-interface. The site also had to respond to the huge shift towards mobile phone sales. In a small, yet highly competitive marketplace, our goal was to provide an experience that guides users to the point of purchase as seamlessly as possible, cementing customer loyalty with repeat orders.

Having reviewed a number of third-party systems for the project, and discussing them with the client, we opted to develop a bespoke eCommerce system to deliver the precise technical and administrative requirements of the brief.

Another consideration was the search engine positions. The old site performed well, so we needed a solution that looked great, yet still accommodated their existing SEO friendly content.

The Solution:

Stikins’ primary market is a very specific demographic, i.e. the parents of primary school children, so we adopted a playful, illustrative style that reflects this. This was balanced, however, with a clean, intuitive, modern interface that parents can easily navigate through the ordering process.

When landing on the site, the user is able to design, preview and order their product from one screen.

The instant online preview feature allows customers to see their text in real time, and at actual size. The print size on Stikins® labels adjusts during the production process to fill the available space on the label so this feature helps customers to decide how much detail they want to put on the label before the print gets too small. Seamless Paypal Express and postcode lookup integrations all help with the buying momentum which is expected today by mobile phone users.

We streamlined a number of day-to-day processes within the admin panel for the client, allowing for bespoke data exports, automated batch ordering and bulk label printing. The site has a super fast and advanced search function for use by customer service staff as they take customer calls. In addition, 1000’s of blog articles needed to be transferred from their old website to retain their SEO benefits. As this was not feasible to do manually, we wrote a custom module that automated this particular population exercise.

Our Technical Manager David Farmer, who headed the project says:

“The Stikins project was a great opportunity for us to improve what was already a successful website. Focusing heavily on UX for both desktop and mobile users, our primary goal was to create a fast checkout for their personalised products. In benchmark testing we reduced the checkout time from a few minutes to just a few seconds by integrating PayPal Express.

In addition to this, we also focused heavily on search engine optimisation by making use of the 1000’s of reviews submitted online and our clients historic blog posts.

We look forward to working closely with the client over forthcoming months to further refine the checkout and maximise the conversion rate and checkout efficiency.”

The outcome

The feedback from both Stikin’s and their customers since launching the new site has been excellent. We’re genuinely over-the-moon to see it being met with such high praise and we’d like to extend our thanks to Stikins for firstly, giving us the opportunity to work with them, and secondly, being so hands on and collaborating with us closely to deliver a project we’re both proud of.

From the client:

Three weeks ago, our new e-commerce name labels website went live!

Our old site functioned well and had delivered our sales and growth for over a decade. We had excellent rankings, reviews, and blogs with over 100,000 existing online customers. However, technology has moved on and server technology, coding, customer expectations, and Google are all entirely different from how they were 10 years ago. The business decision to have a brand new site was huge but vital to our future online development.

We selected Netbiz as our supplier; we had in mind the size of company we wanted to deal with, and that we wanted everything from one excellent supplier; i.e. development, SEO, design, and hosting.

We also wanted a company within 60 miles. Loads of companies had the technical expertise but, in addition, Netbiz had the ethos of understanding their client’s business and engaging with long term planning. We checked this by talking with their references and by looking at some of their 500 sites.

Netbiz have delivered an excellent name labels e-commerce solution for us, which is fantastically easy for customers to use to order, preserves the historic content of the old site, and gives us all the background admin we need. The whole development process has been pleasant and professional. In addition, they continue to work with us on a retainer basis to further improve and develop the site.

The best thing to do is to visit www.stikins.co.uk and www.netbizgroup.co.uk to see for yourself.